With just three days to go to the Iowa caucuses, gone are the references to railroads, space exploration, heavy policy positions or the nitty-gritty of running for office that he’d kept to even as he rose and fell in the polls. Thursday night, he didn’t get to talking about his jobs plan until finishing an extended impromptu history lesson about Abraham Lincoln’s decision to build the transcontinental railroad after a visit to Council Bluffs. But in Council Bluffs on Saturday morning, 50 yards from the tracks and in earshot of a train noisily rumbling by, he didn’t even mention it.

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Instead, Gingrich stayed mostly on message, delivering a nearly identical speech for the fourth time in a row — a sudden show of consistency.

Of course, he’s not a completely changed man. At a town hall meeting here Saturday afternoon, Gingrich delivered his neatly segmented remarks on taxes, regulations and an overarching economy, but when asked to explain his position on global warming, he delivered a new line.

“I’m an amateur paleontologist,” Gingrich said. “I spend a lot of time looking at the Earth’s temperature for a very long time. I’m a lot harder to convince than just looking at a computer model.”

Gingrich appears to get bored giving the same speech over and over again, instead straying off message and relishing in fielding questions from the audience, which he spends most of his events doing.

That’s led him down unexpected paths — but ones he’s almost always been willing to engage.

Take the last stop on Tuesday at Mabe’s Pizza in Decorah, where a woman asked if America is prepared for a pandemic.

“I honestly don’t know, and it would depend on what kind of pandemic it was,” Gingrich said.

He wasn’t done. For several minutes, he went on about the quality of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — based in Georgia, the state he represented in the House, he noted. Then he told the woman that what he’s really concerned about is the threat of an electromagnetic pulse, a frequent subject of Gingrich diversions that he even brought up on stage at the CNN debate in Washington, D.C., last month.

Gingrich acknowledges his tendency to stray.

At a campaign stop in Sioux City on Thursday morning, as he was starting to wander into an unprompted discussion on Freddie Mac, “What does your jobs plan mean for Iowa?” was shouted from the back.